Yes, this is an issue that should for sure be noted on the main installation page. I just spent a day banging my head against the wall wondering why my brand new clean install didn't work. Not a great intro to the product.

This is an annoying issue that I too have spent a lot of time on. Looking around at the Internet it seems like many others have the same issue and it is one that will only get bigger since even the official Raspbian image is Stretch.

Excuse my first reply above, but you need to realize what kind of product you own. It keeps writing megabytes of logs per hour, degrading the SD card (change the log-level manually to avoid this). It keeps crashing every several versions (current 2.3.6 is a good example). And ... nothing. Virtually no reaction of the vendor*. So don't expect fixing it for Stretch soon I am afraid...

Regards,
-DarS

*) - one correction though. Representative(s) of vendor sometimes can answer the typical 'works for me'.
They use nicer words though, like 'Z-Way works for many thousands of users daily (I have it at home too) and they restart it only once per quarter to install updates.'

Excuse my first reply above, but you need to realize what kind of product you own. It keeps writing megabytes of logs per hour, degrading the SD card (change the log-level manually to avoid this). It keeps crashing every several versions (current 2.3.6 is a good example). And ... nothing. Virtually no reaction of the vendor*. So don't expect fixing it for Stretch soon I am afraid...

Strictly speaking, they asked the community for a work-around, not for an official fix.

But with that said, I can't keep from noticing that the number of people reporting the consistent crashing on this forum is limited to a very small handful. This tells me that the problem is very rare. This again makes it very difficult to debug. Take me, for instance. I'm on 2.3.6 and not experiencing any crashing. I've had a system running for years, and have had zero SD-card problems without changing the logging level – although it's probably a good idea to limit logging nonetheless.

The vendor has asked users reporting crashes for logs and debug information – because what else can they do? They need to either reproduce the problem, which means getting as much information about the state of the crashing system as possible in order to put their own system in a similar state, or to understand the issue purely from the information generated from the crashing system, which means getting as much information about the the state of the crashing system as possible. In both cases, well, I think you understand the issue. They need logs. And often, this is not provided by the ones complaining about the crashing. The comments about Z-Way working for thousands of users was a response to claims that it's crashing without providing logs and other requested information when asked and clearly meant to make the point I made above: this issue is rare, so logs must be provided for them to be able to locate the problem.

But I'm not trying to excuse the vendor totally here. They could be more helpful and active on the customer service and support side. And they probably should have implemented some automatic crash reporting a long time ago so that users don't have to post huge logs and run debuggers and whatnot. And they should have solved the issue with Stretch a long time ago. But I don't think your description of a massively malfunctioning product and a vendor who doesn't take problems seriously maps very well onto reality.

I'm completely new to z-way. This was not a good start for me.
Drop legacy Jessie and get it running on Stretch.
Stretch installed will come in handy for debugging and reading this thread that explains why it doesn't work.
I now understands why they had so many returned open box z-wave's at the store.
This is a big problem and not every beginner bothers to complain.
I'm afraid I will have to give up on this before I even got started.